42 (1993): 40–46; http://www.jstor.org/stable/23350751.1. For examples of recent interest in La Tour, see Georges de La Tour in Milan: The Adoration of the Shepherds, Christ with St. Joseph in the Carpenter’s Shop, ed. Valeria Merlini, Daniela Storti, and Dimitri Salmon (Milan: Skira, 2011); Jacques Thuillier, Georges de La Tour, trans. Fabia Claris (Paris: Flammarion, 2012); and the exhibition Georges de La Tour 1593–1652, curated by Andrés Úbeda de los Cobos and Dimitri Salmon, at Madrid Museo Nacional del Prado, 2016.
2. Anthony Blunt, “Georges de La Tour at the Orangerie,” Burlington Magazine 114, no. 833 (August 1972): 525.
3. Pascal Quignard, Georges de La Tour, trans. Barbara Wright (Paris: Flohic, 1991), 62.
4. Pariset considers this bareness as an expression of a Lorraine religiosity marked by the mysticism of the Franciscans and their ideal of poverty. François-Georges Pariset, Georges de La Tour (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1948), 322–323.
5. Raymond Picard was first to note the fact that such distinctions do not neatly hold. Raymond Picard, “L’unité spirituelle de Georges de La Tour,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6, no. 80 (1972): 213.
6. Philip Conisbee, “An Introduction to the Life and Art of Georges de La Tour,” in Georges de La Tour and His World, ed. Philip Conisbee (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 49.
7. Rudolf Wittkover, Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600–1750, rev. ed. (1958; London: Penguin, 1965), 2–3.
8. See Giovanni Pietro Bellori’s comments in Life of Caravaggio (1672) published in his Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti moderni (Rome, 1672). The text is an abridged English translation in Walter Friedlaender’s Caravaggio Studies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1955), 245–254.
9. Catherine Puglisi observed that while Caravaggio used light to convey communication between man and God, his treatment rarely included showing the sources of light in his paintings. Catherine Puglisi, Caravaggio (London: Phaidon, 2000), 57.
10. John Rupert Martin, Baroque (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 119.
11. Martin underlines the difficulty in defining the borderlines of genre scenes and allegory, since symbols are concealed in the form of familiar household items. Ibid., 128–129.
12. See Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the historical character of baroque allegory and emblem books in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 159–167; also see Martin’s account in Baroque, 121.
13. Paulette Choné, Emblèmes et pensée symbolique en Lorraine (1525–1633): Comme un jardin au cœur de la Chrétienté (Paris: Klincksieck, 1991).
14. For a historical analysis of the importance of the word in comparison to visual concerns in the early modern period, see Robert Mandrou, Introduction à la France moderne, 1500–1640. Essai de psychologie historique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1974), 76–81.
15. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 177. For an analysis of word and image relations in French painting during the classical period, see Norman Bryson’s groundbreaking study, Word and Image: French Painting in the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 29–57.
16. See Michel Foucault’s discussion of the interface of the eye and the ear in the early modern period before the advent of an autonomous vision and the separation of the faculties in Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 58. For the allegorical implications of this crossover, see Martin, Baroque, 121.
17. See Walter Benjamin’s discussion in Origin of German Tragic Drama, 175.
18. Lorraine’s participation in the Catholic Reform movement reflected its geographical situation and the religious affiliations of its leaders as well as its historical links and allegiance to Rome, as noted by Conisbee in “An Introduction to the Life and Art of Georges de La Tour,” 72–76.
19. See John W. O’Malley’s discussion in “Trent, Sacred Images, and Catholics’ Senses of the Sensuous,” in The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, ed. by Marcia B. Hall and Tracy E. Cooper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 32–36.
20. This iconoclastic incident, reported by a government agent in Flanders in 1566, provides an example of the language used to incite violence. Elizabeth A. Honig, Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 19; for her analysis of idolatry and iconoclasm in the Low Countries, see 24–28.
21. In its twenty-fifth and last session, The Council of Trent, the Twenty-Fifth Session: The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Ecumenical Council of Trent, ed. and trans. J. Waterworth (London: Dolman, 1848), 234; https://history.hanover.edu/texts/trent/ct25.html.
22. Ibid., 235.
23. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 159–190; and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968).
24. For a comprehensive account of La Tour’s rediscovery and the reattribution of his works, see Jean-Pierre Cuzin and Dimitri Salmon, Georges de La Tour. Histoire d’une redécouverte (Paris: Découverte Gallimard, 2004), 12–21.
25. Prior to Voss, there was a little-known biographical study by the French architect Alexandre Joly published in 1863, which sought to reestablish La Tour’s first name (as Georges) and provided the first comprehensive biographical account based on his recovery of a few parish, municipal, business, and legal documents.
26. Written by the Benedictine scholar Dom Augustin Calmet (1672–1757), this notice referred to a reputed seventeenth-century artist mistakenly called Claude du Ménil de la Tour (instead of Georges de La Tour), who excelled in nocturnes. See Bibliothèque Lorraine, ou histoire des hommes illustres qui ont fleuri en Lorraine (Nancy, 1751); it was republished in the 1800s, and it was this version that came to Voss’s attention.
27. Vic-sur-Seille was a fortified town that served as the seat of the bishopric of Metz. For a study of the region of Lorraine during La Tour’s lifetime, see Patricia Behre Miskimin, “Lorraine in the Time of Georges de La Tour,” in Georges de La Tour and His World, ed. Philip Conisbee (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 219–231.
28. For biographical information, see Henri Tribout de Morembert, “Georges de La Tour, son milieu, sa famille, ses oeuvres,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6, no. 83 (1974): 212–214; see also Anne Reinbold, Georges de La Tour (Paris: Fayard, 1991), 25; and for a discussion of his artistic influences, see Conisbee, “An Introduction to the Life and Art of Georges de La Tour,” 16–24.
29. Art historians are divided on this issue. François-Georges Pariset, Jacques Thuillier, Pierre Rosenberg, and others posit a visit to Rome, customary with many French painters of this time, where he supposedly fell under the influence of Caravaggio or his Italian followers. Other art historians, such as Anthony Blunt, Benedict Nicolson, Christopher Wright, Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Philip Conisbee, and Leonard Joseph Slatkes, note the brief timeframe for such a visit and postulate instead the influences of the northern followers of Caravaggio.
30. This award is mentioned in Calmet’s notice in Bibliothéque Lorraine, 948; cited by Cuzin and Salmon, Georges de La Tour, 16–17; my translation.
31. For descriptive summaries of these documents, see Thuillier, Georges de La Tour, 298–299; and for a detailed account of La Tour’s rediscovery and works, see Cuzin and Salmon, Georges de la Tour, 12–21.
32. For a summary in English of his rediscovery, see Dimitri Salmon, “The Invention of Georges de La Tour, or the Major Phases of His Resurrection,” in Georges de La Tour in Milan: The Adoration of the Shepherds, Christ with Saint Joseph in the Carpenter’s Shop, ed. Valeria Merlini, Daniela Storti, and Dimitri Salmon (Milan: Skira, 2011), 37–62.
33. The lack of dates and titles of the majority of La Tour’s paintings has led to significant discrepancies in the assignment of dates and titles by scholars and museum curators. For purposes of consistency, this study refers to the dates and titles of assigned by Philip Conisbee in his National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C., 1997) exhibition catalogue, based on his comprehensive review and account of the scholarship in English. See Conisbee, “Catalogue of Exhibition,” in Georges de La Tour and His World, ed. Philip Conisbee (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 260–284.
34. See Conisbee, “Introduction to the Life and Art of Georges de La Tour,” 84. His pictorial claims are based on Claire Berry’s technical analysis of the two versions of the card cheats, which suggests their derivation from a common source or cartoon. See Claire Berry, “Appendix: La Tour and Autoradiography,” in Georges de La Tour and His World, ed. Philip Conisbee (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 290.
35. For an analysis of problems posed by multiples in premodern art, see Walter Cupperi, “Introduction: Never Identical. Multiples in Pre-Modern Art?” in Multiples in Pre-Modern Art, ed. Walter Cupperi (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2014), 7–28.
36. To name just a few examples: The Musicians’ Brawl (c. 1625–1627, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; after Georges de La Tour, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Chambéry); St. Jerome (c. 1628–1630, Musée du Grenoble; c. 1630–1632, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm); The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs (c. 1630–1634, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth) and The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds (c. 1630–1634, Musée du Louvre, Paris); The Repentant Magdalene (c. 1640–1645, Musée du Louvre, Paris; The Magdalene with the Smoking Flame, c. 1636–38, Los Angeles County Museum of Art); The Education of the Virgin (attributed to Georges de La Tour or Étienne de La Tour, 1650, Frick Collection, New York; another version believed to be a copy, Musée du Louvre, Paris); The Discovery of St. Alexis (c. 1645–1648, Musée Historique Lorrain, Nancy; National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin); and St. Sebastian Tended by Irene (c. 1649, Musée du Louvre, Paris; c. 1649–1650, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). Many of these parallel versions are discussed in depth in the following chapters.
37. See Maria H. Loh’s discussion of “multiple originals” and Titian in Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art (Los Angeles: Getty Research Trust, 2007), 20–33.
38. See works cited in documentary sources before 1915 in Thuillier, Georges de La Tour, 296–297.
39. Thuillier, Georges de La Tour, 240.
1. See François-Georges Pariset, Georges de La Tour (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1948), 104–114, 130–137; Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 5th ed., rev. R. Beresford (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 172–173; and Leonard Slatkes, “Georges de La Tour and the Netherlandish Followers of Caravaggio,” in Georges de La Tour and His World, ed. Philip Conisbee (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 202–213. For an analysis of Caravaggio and his followers, see Richard E. Spear, Caravaggio and His Followers (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
2. André Malraux, Les voix du silence (Paris: La Gallerie de la Pleiade, 1951), 388–389.
3. Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 173.
4. This emphasis on hearing reflects the propagation of religious experience in the early modern period through audition, as fides est per aures (faith is in the ears); see Robert Mandrou, Introduction à la France moderne (1500–1640). Essai de psychologie historique, 2nd ed. (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1974), 76–81.
5. See Hans Blumenberg’s philosophical elaboration of the distinctions between vision and hearing in “Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation” (1957), in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin, trans. Joel Anderson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 44–49.
6. For an analysis of the social and religious background of these representations of blind musicians, see Jean-Yves Ribault, “Réalisme plastique et réalité sociale: a propos des aveugles musiciens de Georges de La Tour,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 104 (1984): 1–4.
7. Anthony Blunt, “The Joueur de vielle of Georges de La Tour,” Burlington Magazine 86 (1945): 108–110. Cf. Pariset, Georges de La Tour, 290–298.
8. Moshe Barasch contrasts two interpretations of blindness embodied in the fraudulent beggar or the inspired singer/seer in Blindness: The History of a Mental Image in Western Thought (New York: Routledge, 2001), 140.
9. These works stand in contrast to La Tour’s The Musicians Brawl (1625–1627, Getty Center, Los Angeles), where the representation of blind musicians is associated with fraudulent attempts to feign blindness.
10. Matilde Marcolli suggests that music and musical instruments serve as figures for the brevity and passing nature of time (Tempus fugit) in seventeenth-century Vanitas paintings in “Still Life as a Model of Spacetime,” http://www.its.caltech.edu/~matilde/StillLifeSpacetime.pdf, 11.
11. Jacques Thuillier interprets this trompe l’oeil motif as an expression of La Tour’s quest for realism in Georges de La Tour, trans. Fabia Claris (Paris: Flammarion, 2012), 82.
12. This valorization of the voice reflects the primacy of the biblical word when compared to light; see Thomas Frangenberg, “Auditus visu prestantior: Comparisons of Hearing and Vision in Charles de Bovelles’s Liber de sensibus,” in The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgement from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century, ed. Charles Burnett, Michael Fend, and Penelope Gouk (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1991), 85–89.
13. For the uses of visual images to attain spiritual insight, see David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 161–190.
14. Grate observed that the substitution of the penitential rope for the stone created problems of identification that are resolved in the Stockholm version by the addition of the cardinal’s hat; see Pontus Grate, “Quelques observations sur les Saint Jerôme de Georges de La Tour,” La Revue des Arts 9, no. 1 (1959): 20–21. Conisbee remarked that La Tour’s pictorial conflation of the breast-beating Jerome and the Jerome flogged by angels may have been dictated by the artist’s patron; see Philip Conisbee, “An Introduction to the Life and Art of Georges de La Tour,” in Georges de La Tour and His World, ed. Philip Conisbee (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 79.
15. St. Jerome recounted his dream of being flayed by angels for taking pleasure in pagan texts to the detriment of his biblical readings in his “Letter to Eustochium,” Letter 22, Sec. 7, http://www.tertullian.org/fathers2/NPNF2-06/Npnf2-06-03.htm#P583_110510. Further analysis of the competing demands of pagan and sacred texts can be found in Chapter 4.
16. Thuillier has noted this reiterative procedure in La Tour’s works starting with the Hurdy-Gurdy Players, which he described in terms of La Tour’s efforts to attain descriptive and visual mastery; see Thuillier, Georges de La Tour, 82.
17. Jean-Pierre Cuzin, “La Tour vu du Nord: notes sur le style et la chronologie de ses oeuvres,” in Georges de La Tour, by Jean-Pierre Cuzin and Pierre Rosenberg, exhibition catalog, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 1997–1998 (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1997), 76. Blunt suggests that La Tour may have been involved in the making of “copies” of his works by supervising their production and touching them up; see Anthony Blunt, “Georges de La Tour at the Orangerie,” Burlington Magazine 114, no. 833 (August 1972): 516–524.
18. Loh has shown that “original copies” or “multiple originals” play a significant role in Titian’s practice, and she argued for “repeatability” as “a built-in intention for many of his inventions”; see Maria H. Loh, Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art (Los Angeles: Getty Research Trust, 2007), 21–22.
19. Roger de Piles, L’idée du peintre parfait, ed. Xavier Carrère (Paris: Le Promeneur, 1993), 107–108; cited in Loh, Titian Remade, 20.
20. Roger de Piles, Abregé de la vie des peintres. Avec des reflexions sur leurs ouvrages, et un traité du peintre parfait; de la connaissance des desseins; de l’utilité des estampes, 2nd ed. (Paris: Jacques Estienne, 1715), 254–255. De Piles gives as an example Titian’s renditions of Mary Magdalene, where he changed only the background, as cited in Loh, Titian Remade, 20.
21. These parallel iterations are at work on the level of content, arrangement, and specific language, and they are believed to be the mark of their textual interdependence on the Gospel of Mark; see Marc Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze (London: T&T Clark, 2001), 16.
22. The Synoptic Gospels’ reliance on triple witnesses recalls Mosaic law, which required two witnesses to validate an accusation. Having an attestation based on three witnesses suggests an appeal to a criterion of unassailability whose veracity is posited in excess of the demands of Jewish law (Deut. 17:6; 19:15).
23. For a comprehensive analysis of the history and pictorial signification of the nocturne, see Paulette Choné, L’atelier des nuits. Histoire et signification de la nocturne dans l’art de l’Occident (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1970), 17–55, 146–152.
24. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on Saints, 2 vols., trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1:375.
25. Voragine interpreted her name Mary or Maria as signifying “bitter tears” (amarum mare, in Latin) or as “illuminator” or “illuminated.” These three meanings reflected the threefold nature of the choices she made, referring to the part of penance, of inward contemplation, and of heavenly glory; see Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:374.
26. Françoise Bardon analyzes the presence of these light-based themes in the painting and the religious literature of seventeenth-century France; see “Le thème de la Madeleine pénitente au XVIIe siècle en France,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 31 (1968): 274–306.
27. Christine de Pizan, Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (London: Persea, 1983), 28–29.
28. For various biblical accounts of these incidents as recounted by the Apostles, see Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalene: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Harcourt, 1993), 5–11.
29. Nancy interprets this biblical scene as figuring through parable the intertwining of the visible and the invisible; see Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli Me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body, trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 7, 27.
30. See Denis Lebey de Batilly of Metz, Emblemata (1596), also quoted in Paulette Choné, Emblèmes et pensée symbolique en Lorraine (1525–1633): Comme un jardin au cœur de la Chrétienté (Paris: Klincksieck, 1991), 531n., 505, 538.
31. See Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. Katharine H. Jewett (New York: Routledge, 2001), 108.
32. See “Republic X,” 596d, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, trans. Paul Shorey (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), 821.
33. See Victor I. Soichita’s discussion in The Self-Aware Image: An Insight Into Early Modern Meta-Painting, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 185.
34. In a print based on La Tour’s painting attributed by Pariset to Jean Le Clerc (1587–1633), a contemporary of La Tour from the Duchy of Lorraine, the mirror is shown correctly depicting the back of the skull; see Pariset, Georges de La Tour, 121–122.
35. Benedict Nicholson and Christopher Wright also noted that the image in the mirror “defies the laws of plausibility,” in their Georges de La Tour (New York: Phaidon, 1974), 39.
36. For a discussion of painting as a mirror of nature in seventeenth-century Dutch art, see Thijs Weststeijn, The Visible World: Samuel Van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in Dutch Golden Age Painting (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 271–273.
37. All biblical quotations are from The Holy Bible [King James Version] (New York: New American Library, 1974). Jurgis Baltrušaitis examines the trope of the mirror as a figure for the Gospel and Christ the Savior during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Anamorphic Art (New York: Abrams, 1977), 78–85.
38. Quoted in J. Choux, “Le miroir de la Madeleine chez Georges de La Tour,” Le Pays Lorrain 54, no. 2 (1973): 112; see also Choné, Emblèmes et pensée symbolique (1525–1633), 508; and Conisbee, “Introduction,” 102. Jacques Callot executed the frontispiece of La Saincte Apocatastase, which collected de L’Auge’s renowned sermons against Protestant heresy delivered in Nancy at the church of the Cordeliers in 1619; see Conisbee, “An Introduction to the Life and Art of Georges de la Tour,” 74.
39. Le Floch has noted that the metaphor of the mirror, when considered from the perspective of the beholder, rejoins the metaphor of the shadow, which is far more common in biblical texts, but the shadow is less fugitive than the mirror image because it persists as long as the light endures, whereas the image is contingent on the presence of the onlooker; see Jean-Claude Le Floch, Le signe de contradiction. Essai sur Georges de La Tour et son oeuvre (Rennes: Press Universitaires de Rennes, 1995), 47.
40. See Louis Marin, “Echographies: The Crossings of a Conversion,” in Cross-Readings, trans. Jane Mary Todd (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 53. See also Michael Schwartz, “Raphael’s Authorship in The Expulsion of Heliodorus,” Art Bulletin 79 (1997): 487.
41. Meyer Schapiro, “Frontal and Profile as Symbolic Forms,” in Words, Script, and Pictures: Semiotics of Visual Language (New York: George Brazillier, 1996), 73.
42. Pariset also notes the mirror’s ornate frame and the pictorial effort it entails; see François-George Pariset, “La Madeleine aux deux flames: un nouveau Georges de La Tour?” Bulletin de la Société de l’Art Français (Paris, 1961): 42–44.
43. For an analysis of this notion of illumination in St. Augustine, see Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth,” 42–44.
44. For an examination of candles and their spiritual significance in the emblematic literature of the seventeenth century, see Choné, Emblèmes et pensée symbolique, 523–531.
45. See Melchior-Bonnet’s description of the role of the mirror in medieval spirituality in The Mirror, 108.
46. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, trans. William Cobb (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 168.
47. See Diana Silberman-Keller’s analysis of the mirror’s capacity to mediate sight in Mirrors Triptych Technology: Remediation and Translation Figures (New York: Atropos, 2009), 53.
48. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical discussion of chiasm (as the crossing and intertwining of the visible and the invisible) refers to the invisible in order to outline the conditions of possibility of vision. Rather than presupposing a theological referent, he posits the invisible not as something hidden but as “doubled with a complimentary vision or with another vision.” See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 134.
49. For a quick summary of chiasm, see http://www.gotquestions.org/chiasm-chiastic.html; and for a scholarly account, see Brad McCoy, “Chiasmus: An Important Structural Device Commonly Found in Biblical Literature,” CTS Journal 9, no. 2: 18–21, 25–34; also see John Breck, The Shape of Biblical Language: Chiasmus in the Scriptures and Beyond (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994), 18–19, 181.
50. Anthony Paul describes “mirror chiasm” as combining “formal symmetry with paradox and contradiction”; see his “From Stasis to Ekstasis: Four Types of Chiasmus,” in Chiasmus and Culture, ed. Boris Wiseman and Anthony Paul (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 23.
51. For the problems of connoisseurship posed by these repeated compositions, see Edgar Preston Richardson, “Georges de La Tour’s ‘St. Sebastian Nursed by Irene,’ ” Art Quarterly 12, no. 1 (1949): 85–86.
52. For an interpretation of these elements in terms of marriage, holy, secular, or artistic, see Le Floch, Le signe de contradiction, 49–50.
53. Pariset, Georges de La Tour, 161–162.
54. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 186. For an analysis of chiasm (understood as encroachment, intertwining, and reversibility) as a new type of relation between the seer and the seen, see Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel, “Chiasm in Merleau-Ponty: Metaphor or Concept?” in Chiasmus and Culture, ed. Boris Wiseman and Anthony Paul (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 93–108.
1. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen H. Voss (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1989); and Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel (La Haye and Rotterdam: A. and R. Leers, 1690).
2. Descartes’s secularizing intervention is not limited to the passions but is already visible in his theological foundation of subjectivity in the Meditations; see my Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 173–183.
3. Erich Auerbach noted that the meaning of the Latin term passio emerged from the Greek pathos, which also signified passivity and suffering; see his “Passio as Passion,” in Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach: Time, History, and Literature, ed. James I. Porter, trans. Jane O. Newman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014), 165.
4. Émile Mâle, L’art religieux de la fin du XVIe siècle, du XVIIe siècle et du XVIIIe siècle. Etude sur l’iconographie après le Concile de Trente. Italie, France, Espagne, Flandres, 2nd ed. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1972), 65–72.
5. Thomas Worcester, “Trent and Beyond: Arts of Transformation,” in Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroque Image, ed. Franco Mormando (Boston: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 1999), 87.
6. Mâle, L’art religieux, 53.
7. Irving Lavin, “Georges de La Tour: The Tears of St. Peter and the ‘Occult’ Light of Penitence,” in L’Europa e l’arte italiana, ed. Max Seidel (Venice: Marsilio Editore, 2000), 354.
8. See articles on “The Sacrament of Penance” and “The Virtue of Penance” in the Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11618c.htm; http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11618b.htm.
9. See Michel de Certeau’s observations in “Mystic Speech,” in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 88–100.
10. See Alain Tapié, Les vanités dans la peinture du XVIIe siècle (Caen: Musée de Caen, 1990), 138; and Françoise Bardon, “Le thème de la Madeleine pénitente au XVIIe siècle en France,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 31 (1968): 274–306.
11. Philip Conisbee has suggested that this light may have issued from a possible divine source outside the painting. See Philip Conisbee, “An Introduction to the Life and Art of Georges de La Tour,” in Georges de La Tour and His World, ed. Philip Conisbee (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 114. Pierre Rosenberg and François Macé de Lépinay have suggested that there may be a third source of light (emanating from the right) that illuminates the cockerel; see their Georges de La Tour (Fribourg: Office du Livre, 1973), 158.
12. Irving Lavin’s comments are based on Choné’s analysis of emblematic traditions, specifically on Giulio Cesare Capaccio’s (1552–1634) study Della selva dei concetti scritturali, 2 vols. (Venice 1594, 1600), vol. 2, fol. 193; see Paulette Choné, Emblèmes et pensée symbolique en Lorraine (1525–1633): Comme un jardin au cœur de la Chrétienté (Paris: Klincksieck, 1991), 513–515; Lavin, “Georges de La Tour,” 365–366.
13. Based on Capaccio, Lavin (“Georges de La Tour,” 367) interprets the lantern as a symbol of the passion, where the lamp is the lamb representing Christ, whose body hides his divinity.
14. See Jean-Pierre Cuzin’s comments in “Catalogue,” in Jean-Pierre Cuzin and Pierre Rosenberg, Georges de La Tour, intro. Jacques Thuillier (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1997), 224.
15. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 126.
16. Quoted by Lavin in “Georges de La Tour,” 359.
17. For these remarks attributed to Cneius Mammeius by Pascal Quignard, see La haine de la musique (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1996), 112–113; my translation.
18. See ibid., 92–93; my translation.
19. Documents show that a “Denial of Saint Peter” was offered by the town of Lunéville to the Marshall La Ferté, the governor of Lorraine, in 1651. His inventory in 1653 described the subject of this work as representing a nocturne “en nuict”; see Cuzin, “Catalogue,” in Georges de La Tour, 272.
20. Le Floch suggests that the religious and profane scenes are deliberately juxtaposed so that they function as extensions of each other; see Jean-Claude Le Floch, Le signe de contradiction. Essai sur Georges de La Tour et son oeuvre (Rennes: Press Universitaires de Rennes, 1995), 20.
21. Peter’s involvement with worldly and, in particular, monetary concerns is rendered explicit in Jesus’s discussion with him regarding the temple tax. Payment for this tax was miraculously settled when Jesus sent Peter to catch a fish in whose mouth was found the gold coin that settled their debt (Matt. 17:23–26).
22. See Stephen J. Binz, The Passion and Resurrection Narratives of Jesus: A Commentary (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1989), 54.
23. See François-Georges Pariset, Georges de La Tour (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1948), 287; and Jacques Thuillier, Georges de La Tour (Paris: Flammarion, 2012), 228–229. Also see Leonard Slatkes, “Georges de La Tour and the Netherlandish Followers of Caravaggio,” in Georges de La Tour and His World, ed. Philip Conisbee (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 207–208.
24. On the pictorial origins and iconography of gambling in Caravaggio and La Tour, see Gail Feigenbaum, “Gamblers, Cheats, and Fortune Tellers,” in Georges de La Tour and His World, ed. Philip Conisbee (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 150–168. On the history of this genre, see Helen Langdon, Caravaggio’s Cardsharps: Trickery and Illusion (Fort Worth, Tex.: Kimbell Art Museum, 2012), 1–66.
25. For an initial elaboration of this notion of spiritual and pictorial betrayal, see my “Spiritual Passion and the Betrayal of Painting in Georges de La Tour,” in Representing Emotions: Evidence, Arousal, Analysis, ed. Helen Hills and Penelope Gouk (London: Ashgate, 2005): 109–122.
26. See Conisbee’s eloquent description of La Tour’s pictorial technique in his “Introduction,” 67.
27. Ibid., 68. In Chapter 3, I examine La Tour’s use of archaic references in clothing as a way of figuring temporal paradoxes and furthering his spiritual agenda.
28. Pariset, Georges de La Tour, 275–276. Jaubert suggests that the young man or prodigal son’s ostentatious feathers allude to a French expression of being had at cards (se faire plumer, in French); see Alain Jaubert, Palettes (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 86–87.
29. Barbara Joan Haeger, “The Prodigal Son in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Art: Depictions of the Parable and the Evolution of the Catholic Image,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 16 (1986): 128.
30. For an analysis of the physiognomy of the face as a metaphor for the soul, see Jean-Jacques Courtine and Claudine Haroche, Histoire du visage. Exprimer et taire ses émotions XVIe-debut XIXe siècle (Paris: Rivages, 1988), 59, 73–74.
31. Jaubert (Palettes, 84) points out that playing cards during this period are used not just for gambling but also divination and that players and cheats could risk excommunication and prison.
32. See Walter Melion’s analysis of the art of depicting reflections (reflexykonst, in Dutch), which drew on the authority of nature to ascribe both truth value and aesthetic value to the painter’s ability to differentiate and simulate the operations of light and the optical properties of diverse materials in Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 60–91.
33. Pariset (Georges de La Tour, 268) mentions the figure of a boy holding a brand in A Boy Blowing on a Firebrand (c. 1645–1650, Tokyo Fuji Art Museum), who is a virtual double of the young page in The Discovery of Saint Alexis (c. 1645–1648, Musée Historique Lorrain, Nancy).
34. See Federico Borromeo, Sacred Painting/Museum, ed. and trans. Kenneth S. Rothwell Jr. (Cambridge, Mass.: The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Harvard University Press, 2010), 33–35.
35. Ingrid Falque, “ ‘See the Bridegroom Cometh; Go out and Meet Him’: On Spiritual Progress and Mystical Union in Early Netherlandish Painting,” in Imago Exegetica: Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments, 1400–1700, ed. Walter S. Melion, James Clifton, and Michel Weemans (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 379.
36. Victor I. Stoichita, Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (London: Reaktion, 1995), 27–28.
37. The Jesuit college at Pont-à-Mousson became an important educational and intellectual hub for postreform Lorraine theologians propagating the ideas of St. Ignatius Loyola, including Louis Richeôme and his renowned student Pierre Fourier, whose residence in Lunéville (1623–1624) overlapped with La Tour’s; see Conisbee, “Introduction,” 74–76.
38. In his dedicatory epistle to Holy Pictures of the Most Mystical Figures (published 1601; English trans. 1625), Louis Richeôme reclaimed the role of allegorical or mystical images as contemplative devices.
39. See Louis Richeôme’s formulation in Peintures spirituelles and Loach’s account of his meditational strategies, which use visual images for contemplation in order to accede to mental or spiritual understanding: Judi Loach, “An Apprenticeship in ‘Spiritual Painting’: Richeome’s La peinture spirituelle,” in Ut pictura meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500–1700, ed. Walter S. Melion, Ralph Dekoninck, and Agnès Guiderdoni (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 341–343.
40. However, it is the Cartesian interpretation of expression based on the mastery of the passions that proves decisive not just for philosophy but also painting, as we can later see in Charles Le Brun’s treatise Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière (1668). For an analysis of this influential text and its accompanying illustrations, see Jennifer Montague, The Expression of the Passions (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994).
1. Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 2.
2. François Dagognet analyzes the impact of printing on the experience of the text in Écriture et iconographie (Paris: Vrin, 2002), 31–32.
3. François-Georges Pariset, Georges de La Tour (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1948), 322–323.
4. Jean-Pierre Cuzin considers this painting as an original, based on its affinities with the Albi series of Apostles; see his “Catalogue,” in Georges de La Tour, by Jean-Pierre Cuzin and Pierre Rosenberg, exhibition catalog, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 1997–1998 (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1997), 110.
5. Glasses became the reader’s emblem, a mark of both the reader’s presence and a symbol of their craft; Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Penguin, 1996), 291.
6. This copy of La Tour is based on a lost original; see Cuzin, “Catalogue,” 110.
7. Le Floch has noted this idea of double reading: Jean-Claude Le Floch, Le signe de contradiction. Essai sur Georges de La Tour et son Oeuvre (Rennes: Press Universitaires de Rennes, 1995), 56.
8. According to Cuzin (“Catalogue,” 110), this copy is considered a workshop piece.
9. Francine Roze, “Présentation d’une oeuvre nouvelle du Musée historique lorrain: “St. Jerome lisant,” in Actes du colloque de Vic-sur-Seille, 9–11 septembre, 1993, 111–114; cited by Cuzin, “Catalogue,” 56.
10. Paulette Choné, “La lanterne et le flambeau,” in Georges de La Tour ou La nuit traversée, ed. Anne Reinbold (Metz: Editions Serpenoise, 1994), 156.
11. This renewal of interest also included other Fathers of the fourth-century Catholic Church: St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and St. Gregory.
12. Meredith J. Gill, “The Painted Interiors of Augustine and Jerome,” in Augustine Beyond the Book: Intermediality, Transmediality, and Reception, ed. Karla Pollman and Meredith J. Gill (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 75–76.
13. See Pierre Courcelle’s analysis of voice and hearing in St. Augustine, “Les voix dans les Confessions de Saint Augustin,” Hermes: Zeitschrift Für Klassische Philologie 80 (1952): 31–46.
14. Manguel, History of Reading, 43.
15. Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf note that in an oral culture audible speech “lives through its power to incorporate other people,” in Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 49.
16. Louis Marin, “Echographies: The Crossings of a Conversion,” in Cross-Readings, trans. Jane Mary Todd (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 241.
17. For a discussion of these anterior scenes of reading, which illustrate the experience of conversion, see Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 75–111.
18. Also known as The Education of the Virgin [Reading], Cuzin (“Catalogue,” 238–239) notes that this image exists in four versions, which are considered copies of a lost original, those from the Frick collection and the Louvre being deemed the most accurate.
19. Pariset, Georges de La Tour, 322.
20. Pascal Quignard, Georges de La Tour, trans. Barbara Wright (Paris: Flohic, 1991), 20; André Malraux, Les voix du silence (Paris: La Gallerie de la Pleiade, 1951), 382.
21. Le Floch (Le signe de la contradiction, 57) described this type of visual effect in the St. Jerome of Stockholm.
22. Manguel, A History of Reading, 71.
23. Daniel Arasse qualified his definition of the Annunciation by noting that “it is nothing but the encounter of two enunciations that make history,” in “Annonciation/énonciation: remarques sur un énoncé pictural de Quatrocento,” Versus 37 (1984): 4; my translation.
24. Arasse (ibid., 3) observes that the angel Gabriel is always represented in profile.
25. Pariset (Georges de La Tour, 238) interprets Mary’s hand gesture in terms of its elegance and preciousness, as a uniquely stylistic effect.
26. Robert Scholes, Protocols of Reading (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 4.
27. Scholes advances this hypothesis in ibid., 6.
28. For an examination of analogies of the Virgin with a book or even, according to St. Albert, with “an entire library,” see Georges Didi-Huberman’s insightful analysis in Fra Angelico. Dissemblance et figuration (Paris: Champs, Flammarion, 1995), 321–322.
29. Scholes, Protocols of Reading, 6.
30. Commenting on a passage of St. Anthony, Didi-Huberman (Fra Angelico, 322) notes the analogy of the Virgin “receiving the imprint of truth from the Word” with a book that lies open “Marie liber generationis.”
31. Nagel also includes other pictorial details, such as the elaboration of architectural and interior settings and a new concern for description of individual bodies, which led to the incorporation of indices of secular change into the timeless figurations of the sacred; Alexander Nagel, “Fashion and the Now-Time of Renaissance Art,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 46 (2004): 33–52.
32. André Félibien, Entretiens sur les vies et les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes (1679), repr. ed. (Londres: David Mortier Libraire, 1705), 3:135–140.
33. Ibid., 3:138.
34. Scholes (Protocols of Reading, 51) ascribes to La Tour’s evocation of the biblical past a lack of historical awareness given its archaic look. However, the painting’s devotional context suggests that La Tour’s appeal to the biblical past functions not as a mimetic representation but as a typological device that both prefigures and foreshadows events.
35. Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico, 38.
36. “The spectacle of historical fashions offered by old art also served as an introduction to the idea that art itself was something that had a history.” Nagel, “Fashion and the Now-Time of Renaissance Art,” 46.
37. Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. Olga Andrejer and Donald Sheehan (Torrance, Calif.: Oakwood, 1996), 42–44.
38. Paul Jamot suggested that this work refers to St. Peter in prison rescued by the angel, in “Georges de La Tour. Á propos de quelques tableaux nouvellement découverts,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 1 (1939): 243–252, 271–286.
39. Jean-Claude Le Floch, La Tour. Le clair et l’obscur (Paris: Éditions Herscher, 1995), 50.
40. Pariset, Georges de La Tour, 253.
41. Elaborated in a photographic context by Barthes, the punctum designates the salient detail that marks and transforms our reception of the image. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 2nd ed., trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 42–49.
42. This gesture also points to the painter’s own hand (tour de main, in French), to his pictorial manner, and to his dexterity implied in his autograph and signature—“de La Tour.” For an analysis of the meanings attached to hand gestures in painting, see Rudolf Wittkower, Allegory and the Migration of Symbols (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 148.
43. Jacques Thuillier, Georges de La Tour, trans. Fabia Claris (Paris: Flammarion, 2012), 190.
44. According to Cuzin (“Catalogue,” 248–249), there are two versions of this image (both copies of a lost original), that of Nancy (later enlarged by the addition of a painted strip) and the other at the National Gallery of Dublin. Other critics, including Conisbee, consider the Nancy painting as an original; see Philip Conisbee, “An Introduction to the Life and Art of Georges de La Tour,” in Georges de La Tour and His World, ed. Philip Conisbee (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 129.
45. See Voragine’s account: Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on Saints, 2 vols., trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1:371–374.
46. Ibid., 1:373.
47. Didi-Hubermann, Fra Angelico, 38.
48. See Henri de Lubac’s influential elaboration of the fourfold system of biblical exegesis—literal, allegorical, tropological, and analogical—in his Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998), 1:131. Regarding visual exegesis, see Divina Quaternitas: A Preliminary Study in the Method and Application of Visual Exegesis (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum Assen, 1978).
49. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 2nd ed., trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 221.
50. Herman Parret, “(Syn)esthésies du visible,” VS, special Issue: Del Visibile (May–December 1993): 59–70.
1. The Flea-Catcher’s dates have been in debate among scholars, ranging from the 1630s to the 1640s. See Benedict Nicolson and Christopher Wright, Georges de La Tour (London: Phaidon, 1974), 30–31; Philip Conisbee, “An Introduction to the Life and Art of Georges de La Tour,” in Georges de La Tour and His World, ed. Philip Conisbee (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 94; Pierre Rosenberg and Jacques Thuillier, Georges de La Tour: Orangerie des Tuileries (Paris: Éditions des Musées Nationaux, 1972), 59–113; and Pierre Rosenberg and François Macé de L’Épinay, Georges de La Tour. Vie et oeuvre (Fribourg: Office du livre, 1973), 14–80.
2. Attributed to Honthorst, this painting was part of General Aubry’s family holdings in Rennes before its identification as a work by La Tour (thanks to the efforts of Marie Berhaut, curator of the Musée de Rennes) and its subsequent acquisition by the Musée Lorrain de Nancy; see François-Georges Pariset, “La servante à la puce par Georges de La Tour,” La Revue des Arts 5 (1955): 91–92; and Alain Larcan, “À propos un tableau de Georges de La Tour du Musée Lorrain dit ‘La Femme à la Puce,’ ” Le Pays Lorrain 57 (1976): 159.
3. Jacques Thuillier (Georges de La Tour, 196) wondered about the interest that this disconcerting work would invite in amateurs of painting.
4. For a comprehensive account of the scholarly literature on The Flea Catcher, see Crissy Bergeron, “Georges de La Tour’s Flea-Catcher and the Iconography of the Flea Hunt in Seventeenth-Century Baroque Art,” MA Thesis, Louisiana State University (2007), 1–46, http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04112007-165514/unrestricted/Bergeron_thesis.pdf.
5. Pariset, “La servante à la puce par Georges de La Tour,” 94.
6. For possible identifications of the flea catcher with biblical servants or handmaidens, see Rosenberg and Macé de L’Épinay, Georges de La Tour, 152; and Larcan, “À propos un tableau de Georges de La Tour,” 161. For pictorial depictions of this theme, see Christine Petra Sellin, Fractured Families and Rebel Maidservants: The Biblical Hagar in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and Literature (New York: Continuum, 2006), 69–99. For associations of this figure with Mary Magdalene or the Virgin, see Rosenberg and Macé de L’Épinay, Georges de La Tour, 78; and Christopher Wright, French Painters of the Seventeenth Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), 46, 196.
7. Pascal Quignard, Georges de La Tour, trans. Barbara Wright (Paris: Flohic, 1991), 64.
8. Conisbee (“Introduction,” 96) finds this attribution surprising given Honthorst’s ribald treatment of a flea hunt; Bergeron (“Georges de La Tour,” 13) comments on the marked differences in figural style and the lack of flea iconography in French art.
9. See Harry Berger’s analysis in Caterpillage: Reflections on Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still-Life Painting (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 4–62.
10. For an analysis and examples of defleaing, delousing, and nitpicking in Dutch paintings (notably by Adriaen Brouwer, Gerard ter Borch, and Michael Sweerts), see Bergeron, “Georges de La Tour,” 15–16. For comments associating spiritual purity and the cleanliness of the body, see Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Vintage, 1997), 400.
11. Benedict Nicholson, “In the Margin of the Catalogue,” Burlington Magazine 100, no. 660 (March 1958): 101n13.
12. For an analysis of fleas used to signify erotic encounters, see Barry Wind, “Close Encounters of the Baroque Kind: Amatory Paintings by Terbrugghen, Baburen, and La Tour,” Studies in Iconography 4 (1978): 115–124. For its French literary analogues, see Etienne Pasquier, La puce de Madame Desroches (1579); and John F. Moffitt’s discussion in “La femme à la puce: The Textual Background of Seventeenth-Century Painted ‘Flea-Hunts,’ ” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 110 (1987): 102.
13. For a critique of the female nude and its relation to the male gaze, see John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1977), 47–64. Clark observed that the subjects of Christian art in which nudes are appropriate or permissible are subjects of pathos; see Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), 312–353.
14. La Tour’s representation of women in his devotional paintings reveals the association of covered, turbaned heads, sanctity, and maternity, as in his Adoration of the Shepherds (c. 1645; Musée du Louvre, Paris) and The New Born Child (c. 1645; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes). These representations stand in contrast to La Tour’s iconography of Mary Magdalene, who is shown with her head uncovered, crowned by the dark tresses of her luxuriant long hair.
15. Alain Larcan, “À propos un tableau de Georges de La Tour,” 161.
16. My comments are indebted to Auerbach’s seminal formulation: “Figural prophecy implies the interpretation of one worldly event through another; the first signifies the second, the second fulfills the first. Both remain historical events; yet both looked at in this way, have something provisional and incomplete about them; they point to one another and both point to something in the future, something still to come, which will be the real, and definitive event.” Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays (New York: Meridian, 1959), 58.
17. See Wright, French Painters of the Seventeenth Century, 46, 196.
18. Richard E. Spear, From Caravaggio to Artemisia: Essays on Painting in Seventeenth-Century Italy and France (London: Pindar, 2002), 15.
19. Le Floch suggests that this scene resembles an anti-Annunciation insofar as it hints at the possibility of the impoverished woman not assuming or even rejecting maternity altogether; Jean-Claude Le Floch, Le signe de contradiction. Essai sur Georges de La Tour et son Oeuvre (Rennes: Press Universitaires de Rennes, 1995), 37–38. However, this would imperil not just the birth of a child but also that of the sacred—an unimaginable possibility given La Tour’s intimations of the painting’s devotional character.
20. Hélène Adhémar, “La Tour et les couvents lorrains,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 80 (1972): 219–222; Thérèse Charpentier, “Peut-on toujours parler de la servante à la puce?” Le Pays Lorrain 54 (1973): 101–108.
21. Choné associates jet beads and modest means: Paulette Choné, Emblèmes et pensée symbolique en Lorraine (1525–1633): Comme un jardin au cœur de la Chrétienté (Paris: Klincksieck, 1991), 510n413; Conisbee (“Introduction,” 96) points out that since Antiquity jet has been linked to magical powers; Bergeron (“Georges de La Tour,” 42) argues for La Tour’s expression of empathy for the predicament of servant girls who found themselves pregnant from their sexual indiscretions.
22. See Jean-Jacques Boissart’s interpretation of the expression “Where he is, there’s faith /loyalty” (ubi amor est fides) in his Emblemes Latins (1588): http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/emblem.php?id=FBOa034.
23. Cf. Chapter 1, where the broken strand of pearls in La Tour’s representation of Mary Magdalene is examined as a sign of her penitential break with worldly concerns.
24. This monumental altarpiece (ten feet high) was commissioned by the Duke Charles III for the Church of the Minims in Nancy, only twenty miles away from La Tour’s home. The painting is framed by medallions representing the fifteen mysteries of the rosary. In its upper section, it depicts the Virgin and child handing out rosaries to saints; in its lower section, it shows the Ducal family of Lorraine, one of whose members later became La Tour’s patron. For an account of this work as an exemplar of Marian devotion in La Tour’s time, see Conisbee, “Introduction,” 17–18.
25. Seaman argues for the importance of this painting to the formation of a taste for Caravaggism in the north along with Honthorst’s return to Utrecht from Italy; Natasha Seaman, The Religious Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2012), 53–55.
26. See Nathan D. Mitchell, The Mystery of the Rosary: Marian Devotion and the Reinvention of Catholicism (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1, 63–69.
27. Ibid., 3–4.
28. Ibid., 72.
29. Ibid., 58.
30. La liturgie dominicaine (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1921–1923), 1:139; quoted by Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico. Dissemblance et figuration (Paris: Champs, Flammarion, 1995), 412; my translation. Ethiopian Christians also refer to the Virgin as the “Gate of Light” (Anqasa Berhan) in an ancient hymn still used both in public and private liturgy and devotion, as quoted by Mitchell, The Mystery of the Rosary, 77.
31. For this compilation of quotes on the nature of Mary as the gate to heaven starting from St. Bonaventura to St. Ambrose, see http://www.catholictradition.org/Mary/mary18a.htm.
32. Leonard Slatkes, “Georges de La Tour and the Netherlandish Followers of Caravaggio,” in Georges de La Tour and His World, ed. Philip Conisbee (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 208–209. His assignation of authorship to Paulus Bor was reattributed to Jacob van Campen; see Albert Blankert, Museum Bredius: Catalogus van de schilderijenen tekeningen (The Hague: Museum Bredius, 1991), 59.
33. The word for flea (puce) is embedded in a number of French words designating virginity, such as a maiden (pucelle), maidenhead (pucellage), and the loss of virginity or deflowering (dépuceler). Verbal expressions that figure profane love or lust’s itch also inscribe, through puns, allusions to maidenhood or virginity.
34. Panurge’s gold earring embedded with a flea signified his desire to marry; see François Rabelais, La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel [1542] (Paris: Chez Dalibon, Libraire, Palais-Royal, 1823), 371. Daniel Russell has suggested that Panurge’s wearing of the flea was a mark both of sexual desire and anxiety as regards the servitude implied in the institution of marriage; see “A Note on Panurge’s ‘pusse en l’oreilles,’ ” Études rabelaisiennes 11 (1974): 87.
35. Guillaume de Deguileville, Pilgrimage of Human Life (1331), trans. Eugene Clasby (New York: Garland, 1992), 151–152.
36. This alternative usage of the expression “to have a flea in one’s ear” is found in Jean de La Fontaine’s Contes and in other seventeenth-century dictionaries such as Antoine Furètiere, Dictionnaire universel (1690).
37. See Ann Rosalind Jones’s discussion of the flea as literary conceit and subject of artistic competition in “Contentious Readings: Urban Humanism and Gender Difference in La Puce de Madame Desroches (1582),” Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995): 109–128. Also see David B. Wilson Jones’s comments regarding the poetic potential of the “flea” as literary trope, in “La Puce de Madame Desroches and Donne’s ‘The Flea,’ ” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 72 (1971): 298.
38. See the definition of “Conversion, n,” OED Online.
39. Richard C. Trench, Synonyms of the New Testament, 9th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1880), 255–261.
40. The epigraph for this section is from Louis Richeôme, The Pilgrime of Loretto; Performing His Vow Made to the Glorious Virgin Mary Mother of God (1604), trans. E. W. (Paris, 1629); reprinted in English Recusant Literature, 1585–1640, ed. David Morrison Rogers (London: Scholars, 1976), 285:49. For a discussion of this text in relation to personal prayer and the liturgy of the sacraments, as well as its reflections on the rosary, see Mitchell, The Mystery of the Rosary, 98–102.
41. John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 156.
42. See the entry on “égrener” in Furetière’s dictionary (1690).
43. Quoted in Gage (Color and Culture, 122), who also noted that red was a most precious cloth suitable to be worn by the fathers of the Church.
44. See the entry “vermillion” in The Winston Dictionary (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1957). Elliott D. Wise mentiones this etymological provenance in “Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Ruusbroec: Reading, Rending, and Re-Fashioning the ‘Twice-Dyed’ Veil of Blood in the Escorial Crucifixion,” in Imago Exegetica: Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments, 1400–1700, ed. Walter S. Melion, James Clifton, and Michel Weemans (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 387–422.
45. See Patrik Reuterswärd’s discussion of the color red and its angelic connotations, in “What Color Is Divine Light,” in Light from Aten to Laser, ed. Thomas B. Hess and John Ashbery (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 120–121.
46. Anthony Blunt, “Georges de La Tour at the Orangerie,” Burlington Magazine 114, no. 833 (August 1972): 525. His interpretation is based on Pasquier’s note specifying that usage of this term also applied to the feminine pucelle; see “La pulse de Catherine de Roches” (1582), 525.
47. Blunt, “Georges de La Tour at the Orangerie,” 525.
48. Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London: Adam Islip, 1611), http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/cotgrave/search/771l.html.
49. For a discussion of the Italian and Netherlandish pictorial traditions of the blowers, see Jean-Pierre Cuzin, “Catalogue,” in Jean-Pierre Cuzin and Pierre Rosenberg, Georges de La Tour, intro. Jacques Thuillier (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1997), 212; also see Slatkes (“Georges de La Tour and the Netherlandish Followers of Caravaggio,” 211), who focuses on Utrecht influences, especially Honthorst and Terbrugghen.
50. A consultation of Lorraine inventories at the Court of Nancy during La Tour’s time refers to “a painting of a blower, in the manner of La Tour [tableau d’un souffleur, façon de La Tour]” (July 1649); see François-Georges Pariset, Georges de La Tour (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1948), 59, 79. Additional references can be found in Rosenberg and Thuillier (Georges de La Tour, 165), which mentions the designation of “blowers of light” (souffleurs de lumière).
51. Pariset, Georges de La Tour, 268.
52. The Online Etymological Dictionary defines spirit dating back to the mid–thirteenth century as “animating or vital principle in man and animals,” from Anglo-French spirit, Old French espirit “spirit, soul” (12th c., Modern French esprit), and derived from Lat. spiritus “a breathing (respiration, and of the wind), breath; breath of a god”; hence “inspiration; breath of life,” hence “life”; also “disposition, character; high spirit, vigor, courage; pride, arrogance,” related to spirare “to breathe.” http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=spirit.
53. See Cotgrave’s entry for “souffleur” (1611), which is consistent with the definition of this term in Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 1st ed. (1694).
54. In my discussion of The Discovery of St. Alexis (c. 1645–1648, Musée Historique Lorrain, Nancy) in Chapter 3, I showed that the meaning of the painting could be revealed only by a letter whose reading illuminated the spiritual import of the image.
55. See Jean Racine’s use of this term in 1677, “Je respire à la fois l’inceste et l’imposture,” in Phèdre, dual language ed., trans. Margaret Rawlings (London: Penguin, 1989), 4.6 (pp. 138–139).
56. See the entry “braise” in Furetière’s dictionary (1690).
57. Slatkes (“Georges de La Tour and the Netherlandish Followers of Caravaggio,” 207) notes that Ter Brugghen’s painting is untraceable, having been sold at Dorotheum (Vienna, December 3, 1959; no. 52) as a Honthorst. It is variably dated between c. 1623–1626.
58. This painting is signed on the upper right as “De La Tour f,” the “f” presumably standing in for “made by” (fecit). The “f” is barely legible; see Georges de La Tour, Orangerie catalogue, 165. The French painter Deruet’s inventory of his collection (1660) documents the presence of at least three Blowers of Charcoal, which gives some indication of the popularity of this theme in the seventeenth century France; see Rosenberg and Thuillier, Georges de La Tour, 166.
59. Honthorst’s painting on this theme, Boy Blowing on a Charcoal Stick (whereabouts unknown) also lacks the gravitas and subtlety of La Tour’s depiction. See Benedict Nicholson and Christopher Wright, Georges de La Tour (New York: Phaidon, 1974), fig. 73.
60. For the references to Pliny and the three artists mentioned, see his Natural History 34.79 on Lycius, 35.138 on Antiphilus, and 35.143 on Philiscus); also see Conisbee’s reference to these traditions, in his “Introduction,” 137. In A Boy Blowing on a Charcoal Stick, this allusion to craft is introduced by the boy’s leather apron, attesting to his apprentice status in an artisanal workshop.
61. This usage is noted in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 4th ed. (1762): “BRAISE se dit aussi Des charbons que les Boulangers tirent de leur four, & qu’ils éteignent ensuite pour les vendre.”
62. See “charbon” in Cotgrave’s 1611 dictionary.
63. Raymond Picard, “L’unité spirituelle de Georges de La Tour,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6, no. 80 (1972): 213–214.
64. The expression “Maître Mouche” is used by Rabelais in Pantraguel XVI, to qualify Panurge’s dexterity in manipulating goblets. The expression “C’est un tour de maistre mouche” is mentioned in Jean Nicot, Thresor de la langue française (1606); and later in Dictionnaire de l’Academie française (1694).
65. Connor illustrates the fly’s association with the creator of the work by referring to Petrus Christus, Portrait of a Carthusian (1466; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), where the fly is positioned above the artist’s signature and claim as maker (“Petrus XPI Me Fecit”); see Steven Connor, “Flysight” (April 15, 2009), http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/flysight/.
66. See the entry for “Flea” in Matthew George Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary, 3rd ed. (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1897).
67. Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, c. 600–625, 12, De animalibus, v. 15, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Isidore/12*.html#5.
68. Among its usages in the seventeenth century, “tour” (in French) signifies giving things a turn. It refers to a skill, manual dexterity, or a manner indicating finesse. But it also has negative connotations, such as a knack or cunning in playing tricks, or a sleight of hand; see Jean Nicot, Le Thresor de la langue francoyse (1606); and Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 1st ed. (1694), in Dictionnaires d’autrefois, http://artflsrv02.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/dicos/pubdico1look.pl?strippedhw=tour.
1. The argument here is not about the question whether iconoclasm can dispense altogether with images, an issue that lies beyond the scope of this study.
2. Alexander Nagel, “Fashion and the Now-Time of Renaissance Art,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 46 (2004): 52.
3. Jean-Luc Marion, “The Blind at Shiloh,” in The Crossing of the Visible, trans. James K. A. Smith (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 62.
4. Ibid., 65–66.
5. Marion argues that in the icon the crossing of the visible and the invisible is effected through the gaze, and it implies an exchange of crossed gazes (one aiming in the way of prayer and the other issued as a benediction); Jean-Luc Marion, “The Crossing of the Visible,” in The Crossing of the Visible, trans. James K. A. Smith (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 21.
6. Taine first identified The Newborn Child as a Dutch painting before misattributing it to the brothers Le Nain. For his comments, see Hippolyte Taine, Carnets de Voyage: Notes sur la Province (written in 1863; published in Paris, 1896); quoted in Pierre Rosenberg, “The Glory of Georges de La Tour,” in Georges de La Tour in Milan: The Adoration of the Shepherds, Christ with Saint Joseph in the Carpenter’s Shop, ed. Valeria Merlini, Daniela Storti, and Dimitri Salmon (Milan: Skira, 2011), 24.
7. Louis Gonse, Les chefs d’œuvres des musées de France. La peinture (1900), quoted in an abridged version in Jean-Pierre Cuzin and Dimitri Salmon, Georges de La Tour. Histoire d’une redécouverte (Paris: Découverte Gallimard, 2004), 149; my translation.
8. Benedict Nicolson and Christopher Wright, Georges de La Tour (London: Phaidon, 1974), 52.
9. Mario Valenti, “Light and Shadow: Painting the Incarnation Mystery (Notes on Orazio Gentileschi’s Annunciation),” Semiotica 136, no. 1/4 (2001): 419.
10. See “Incarnation,” in Pons-Augustin Alletz, Dictionnaire théologique-portatif. Contenant l’exposition et les preuves de la révélation (Paris, 1756), 305–308.
11. For the challenges this poses to the language of painting, see Jean-Luc Nancy, “Visitation: On Christian Painting,” in The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 109–111.
12. For a study of La Tour’s nocturnes in terms of the emblematic associations of night and shadows, see Paulette Choné, “L’académie de la nuit: louange et science de l’ombre au XVIIe siècle,” in L’âge d’or du nocturne (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 17–61.
13. Cf. the formulation of conversion as an event in Louis Marin, “Echographies: The Crossings of a Conversion,” in Cross-Readings, trans. Jane Mary Todd (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 238–251.
14. See Cuzin and Salmon, Georges de La Tour, 22; and also Philip Conisbee, “An Introduction to the Life and Art of Georges de La Tour,” in Georges de La Tour and His World, ed. Philip Conisbee (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 120.
15. Both Correggio’s Adoration of the Shepherds, also known as La Notte (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), and Philippe de Champaigne, Adoration of the Shepherds (1645; Wallace Collection), which is contemporaneous with La Tour’s painting, visibly show the Christ child as a source of light; see Conisbee, “Introduction,” 121.
16. Quoted in Paulette Choné, Emblèmes et pensée symbolique en Lorraine (1525–1633): Comme un jardin au cœur de la Chrétienté (Paris: Klincksieck, 1991), n40. Also see Irving Lavin, “Georges de La Tour: The Tears of St. Peter and the ‘Occult’ Light of Penitence,” in L’Europa e l’arte italiana, ed. Max Seidel (Venice: Marsilio Editore, 2000), 364–367.
17. For metaphors of Christ’s body as a lantern or Lamp, see Lavin, “Georges de La Tour: The Tears of St. Peter,” 369.
18. P. Berchorius, “Reductorium morale,” in Opera Omnia (Antwerp, 1609), 6:4.
19. See the discussion of the color red and its angelic connotations, in Patrik Reuterswärd, “What Color Is Divine Light,” in Light from Aten to Laser, ed. Thomas B. Hess and John Ashbery (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 120–121.
20. See the writings of the early Church Fathers, St. Epiphanius, St. Fulgentius, and St. Ephrem, quoted in Thomas Livius, The Blessed Virgin in the Fathers of the First Six Centuries (London, 1923), 128, 138, 407, 426.
21. Sir Thomas Browne, Cyrus-Garden or the Quincunx Mistically Considered (London, 1658), Chap. 3; quoted in John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 122.
22. The other Old Testament passage that Luke reprises is that of the completion of the tabernacle, when Yahveh descends in a cloud that overshadows the tent, implying a prophetic link to the renewal of Jerusalem.
23. See Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion, 1999), 67–69. Gill notes that this term is used in the New Testament also to designate the Transfiguration of Christ; see Meredith J. Gill, “Until Shadows Disperse: Augustine’s Twilight,” in The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, ed. Marcia B. Hall and Tracy E. Cooper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 259.
24. The dove is a symbol of the Holy Ghost, as in the words of St. John, “I saw the spirit coming down from heaven like a dove and resting upon him” (John 1:32), and in the representations of the Annunciation it signifies the act of conception, which took place in the Virgin’s ear; see James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1979), 109.
25. The lamb was adopted by Christians as a symbol of Christ in his sacrificial role as “Lamb of God,” and in the context of the nativity scene it symbolizes purity and Jesus’s destiny as the ultimate sacrificial offering; see Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, 185–186.
26. See remarks by Carolyn C. Wilson, “Georges de La Tour’s Two Saint Josephs: Theology, Veneration, and Connections with Renaissance Italy,” in Georges de La Tour in Milan: The Adoration of the Shepherds, Christ with Saint Joseph in the Carpenter’s Shop, ed. Valeria Merlini, Daniela Storti, and Dimitri Salmon (Milan: Skira, 2011), 105; and Joseph F. Chorpenning, “The Enigma of St. Joseph in Poussin’s Holy Family on the Steps,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 60 (1997): 276–281.
27. Pliny the Elder, Natural History (c. AD 77–79); 35.5.
28. Ibid.
29. Robert Rosenblum, “The Origin of Painting: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Classicism,” Art Bulletin 39, no. 4 (December 1957): 279–280.
30. Millard Meiss, “Light as Form and Symbol in Some Fifteenth-Century Paintings,” Art Bulletin 27, no. 3 (September 1945): 176; St. Bernard is quoted in A. Salzer, Die Sinnbilder und Beiworte Mariens in der deutchen Literatur und lateinischen Hymnenpoesie des Mittelalters (Linz, 1893), 74.
31. See Salzer, Die Sinnbilder und Beiworte Mariens, 74; quoted by Meiss (“Light as Form and Symbol in Some Fifteenth-Century Paintings,” 177), who noted that these theological analogies entered the vernacular and became pervasive in the popular culture of the Low Countries in the fifteenth century.
32. Hunt remarks that the glass, as wall and sacred boundary, functions like the ancient threshold of a classical sanctuary; see Patrick Hunt, “Abbé Suger and the Medieval Theory of Light in Stained Glass: Lux, Lumen, Illumination,” http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/philolog/2006/01/abbe_sugers_theory_of_light_lu.html.
33. See Meiss, “Light as Form and Symbol in Some Fifteenth-Century Paintings,” 177; Cf. H. Cornell, Biblia pauperium (Stockholm, 1925), 177. Meiss remarks that this image is informed by the prevalence of stained glass in medieval churches and thus on analogies based on art.
34. Commenting on optical effects in The Newborn Child, Falcucci and Rinaldi observe that the hand covering the flame would spread the light thus doubling the child’s shadow on the Virgin’s gown; see Claudio Falcucci and Simona Rinaldi, “A Candle in Darkness: Light and Shadow in the Paintings of Georges de La Tour,” in Georges de La Tour in Milan: The Adoration of the Shepherds, Christ with Saint Joseph in the Carpenter’s Shop, ed. Valeria Merlini, Daniela Storti, and Dimitri Salmon (Milan: Skira, 2011), 177; and that the visual inconsistencies in the depiction of light support the hypothesis of a “theoretical construction of light and shadow” in his paintings.
35. Cf. Marion’s reflections on icons in “The Blind at Shiloh,” 62.
36. Nagel, “Fashion and the Now-Time of Renaissance Art,” 52.
37. There is another painting attributed to La Tour entitled St. Sebastian Tended by Irene (c. 1630–1633; Kimball Art Museum, Fort Worth, Tex.) in horizontal format, with a different iconography, and of which ten examples are known, varying greatly in quality. This deep nocturne depicts Irene tending to St. Sebastian’s arrow wound in the leg; it has no other protagonists and is not a scene of lamentation. For images and discussion of these works, see Jean-Pierre Cuzin and Pierre Rosenberg, Georges de La Tour, intro. Jacques Thuillier (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1997), 166–181.
38. Thuillier, Georges de La Tour, 294; Conisbee, “Introduction,” 85.
39. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entombment_of_Christ_(Caravaggio).
40. My identification of the widow Irene with the mourner in black rather than with the young maiden in red bearing the torch and holding St. Sebastian’s hand accords with Pariset’s interpretation but differs from the majority of scholarly discussions of this work, including Thuillier, Cuzin and Rosenberg, Conisbee, etc.
41. I am referring here to its most renowned sculptural example, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni’s (1475–1564) Pietà (1498–1499; St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City).
42. Zorach has persuasively demonstrated the use of triangles and triangular compositions as devices for promoting the idea of the trinity in late medieval and Renaissance paintings; see Rebecca Zorach, The Passionate Triangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 51–67.
43. His presence was said to have cured a woman of her muteness, and that miracle instantly converted seventy-eight people. See Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, unabridged version, Eng. trans. William Caxton in 1483; reprinted in The Temple Classics, ed. F. S. Ellis (London: Temple Classics,1931), 1:97–98; http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/goldenlegend/GoldenLegend-Volume2.asp#Sebastian.
44. Ibid., 1:99.
45. Ibid.
46. We are told that “two hundred pounds of gold” were spent on this work, thus indicating the supreme value of the labor, expenses, and materials involved. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. St. Irene also mourned and attended to two “deaths” in close proximity: that of her husband Castulus in 286, followed by her supposed “mourning” and attendance to St. Sebastian.
49. See Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:97–99.
50. Arasse considers La Tour’s attention to certain pictorial details, including the most spurious, such as reflections of light on fingernails or the intricate interwoven designs of the meshes of the torch, as indicators of instances of “pure painting”; see Daniel Arasse, Le détail. Pour une histoire raprochée de la peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), 142–143.
51. For a detailed iconography of St. Sebastian from the Middle Ages to the baroque, see Herman Parret, Les Sébastiens de Venise (Louvain: Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, Université de Louvain, 2008).
52. Barthes describes the punctum in terms of its impact on the beholder: it “shoots out of [the photograph] like an arrow and pierces me”; see Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 2nd ed., trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 27.
53. Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (London: Reaktion, 2004), 27.
54. Mario Perniola, “Clothing and Nudity,” Fragments for a History of the Human Body, trans. Roger Friedman, ed. Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone, 1989), 246.
55. Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight Into Early Modern Meta-Painting, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 89.
56. See ibid., 90.
57. François-Georges Pariset, Georges de La Tour (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1948), 210.
58. Sergiusz Michalski observed that the sixteenth-century iconoclastic destruction of images was sometimes accompanied by abusive language adopted from Passion plays in his Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image in Question in Western and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1993), 92. Also see the discussion of the link between iconoclasts and the abusers of Christ in Natasha Seaman, The Religious Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2012), 110–114.
59. Michel Serrès also comments on the column’s self-referential character in “La Tour Traduit Pascal,” in Hermes 3. La traduction (Paris: Minuit, 1974), 222.
60. Benedict Nicholson and Christopher Wright, Georges de La Tour (New York: Phaidon, 1974), 52–53.
61. Rudolf Koch, The Book of Signs (New York: Dover, 1955). For the use of this device in French Renaissance literature, see Michael Giordano, The Art of Meditation and the French Renaissance Love Lyric: The Poetics of Introspection in Maurice Scève’s Délie, Object de Plus Haulte Vertu (1544) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 498–503.
62. Alletz, Dictionnaire théologique-portatif, 144.
63. See Henry G. Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, rev. Henry Stuart James and Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 1991; for an analysis of the renewed popularity of this device, see William E. Engel, Chiastic Designs in English Literature from Sidney to Shakespeare (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009), 1–5.
1. Jacques Thuillier, “La Tour, énigmes et hypothèses,” in Georges de La Tour, Exhibition Catalogue at Orangerie des Tuileries (Paris: Éditions des musées nationaux, 1972), 27; my translation.
2. Dom Calmet’s notice led to Hermann Voss’s rediscovery of La Tour as an artist during World War I and initiated the process of recovery of his pictorial corpus noted in the Introduction to this book.
3. Dom Calmet, Bibliothèque Lorraine ou Histoire des hommes illustres qui ont fleuri en Lorraine (1751), my translation.
4. André Félibien des Avaux, Entretiens sur les vies et les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes; avec la vie des architectes, 6 vols. (Trévoux: De l’Imprimerie de S.A.S., 1725), “Sixième Entretien,” 4:152.
5. Giovanni Pietro Bellori, “Life of Caravaggio” (1672), abridged English trans., in Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1955), 245–254.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Philip Conisbee, “An Introduction to the Life and Art of Georges de La Tour,” in Georges de La Tour and His World, ed. Philip Conisbee (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 123.
9. See Jean-François Lyotard’s analysis of the event-making character of artistic gesture in “Gesture and Commentary,” Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly / 42 (1993): 40–46; http://www.jstor.org/stable/23350751.
10. André Félibien des Avaux, “Préface,” in Conférence de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de sculpture (1688), English translation quoted in Anna Brzyski, Partisan Canons (Raleigh, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 96.
11. For an analysis of the postphenomenological implications of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, see Véronique Marion Fóti, Vision’s Invisibles: Philosophical Explorations (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), 69–80.